What started out as a lucrative legal career for a Georgia attorney has ended with a prison sentence.
This week, Vi Bui, a lawyer from Atlanta, was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison for playing a key role in a massive tax fraud scheme involving fake conservation easement deductions.
The Scam: Making Millions from Fake Land Donations
Between 2012 and 2020, Bui worked as a partner at Sinnott & Co., an Atlanta firm caught up in a long-running scheme that revolved around abusive syndicated conservation easement tax shelters.
Here’s how it worked: Bui and his co-conspirators — including Jack Fisher and James Sinnott, both of whom are already serving decades-long sentences — created shady partnerships that bought land or land-owning companies.
Then, they would “donate” conservation easements on that land, claiming they were protecting the environment.
But that wasn’t the real plan.
The appraisals of the land were wildly inflated, and the partnerships then used these bloated numbers to claim massive fake tax deductions.
Wealthy clients would buy into the partnerships to score big on those fraudulent write-offs — even if they joined after the donation or after the tax year had ended.
Faking It All: Documents, Appraisals, and Sham Votes
To make the scheme look legit to the IRS, Bui and others went to extreme lengths.
They backdated documents, including checks and partnership agreements, to trick auditors into thinking the timeline was legal.
They also tried to make the operations seem like real real-estate development ventures by organizing phony votes about what to do with the land — even though the decisions were already made.
And they drafted piles of paperwork designed to hide the true purpose of the partnerships.
Caught in the Act: Undercover Agents and a 2018 Sting
In one particularly bold moment, Bui was caught red-handed during
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